Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Debian committee members vote for systemd as init system

lists.debian.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 152 posts

Re: Debian committee members vote for systemd as init system

#131

Post by b6fan »

CameronNemo wrote: post #36
jtchang wrote: post #17

Can anyone give a quick rundown of the different init systems? For the most part it can get confusing for a non day to day system administrator when I am trying to get a program to "run on boot". Between rc.local, init.d, run levels, etc. sometimes it is just frustrating.

I am just going to go over Upstart and systemd systemd: dependency based init system. A service is written by declaring which services need to be started for that service to start. It is also a syslog like program (journal) and a cgroups writer (cgroups are a cointainment feature of the linux kernel). It also features socket activated and bus activated services, where the init system watches for a socket or dbus bus…

I have used ptrace and cgroup (in an online judge system). The cgroup way feels more correct and stable while ptrace feels a hack. The usage of ptrace and SIGSTOP in upstart looks pretty ugly to me.

Re: Debian committee members vote for systemd as init system

#132

Post by rodgerd »

norswap wrote: post #120
Spittie wrote: post #2

Those are the votes for systemd: https://lists.debian.org/debian-ctte/2014/02/msg00294.html https://lists.debian.org/debian-ctte/2014/02/msg00283.html https://lists.debian.org/debian-ctte/2014/02/msg00297.html https://lists.debian.org/debian-ctte/2014/02/msg00282.html For anyone wondering, 4 votes are enough because Bdale's vote (the chairman of the Technical Committee) count as two votes in case of a draw. EDIT: see…

When you see how complex it all is, no wonder people make snide comments about committees.

Consider alternatives such as e.g. Mark Shuttleworth unilaterally commanding technology no-one else ends up using.

Re: Debian committee members vote for systemd as init system

#133

Post by rodgerd »

asdfs wrote: post #53
rodgerd wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are no working ports of upstart to non-linux, and up until 2 months ago no-one was even trying to. It's about as portable as systemd (i.e. with a bunch of work and if you don't mind forking it).

The difference is that upstream for upstart is open to BSD/Hurd/etc. ports, whereas upstream for systemd is pretty strongly opposed to them and it does not seem they would assist in the effort.

The upstream is GPL + CLA. From a Debian perspective that's something of a non-starter. You could fork it, but then you're in the same position as you would be with systemd.

Moreover systemd has defined a bunch of stable interfaces; one could choose to expose equivalent interfaces in the HURD rather than port. Upstart seems to be in the "implementation = interface" camp.

Re: Debian committee members vote for systemd as init system

#134

Post by rodgerd »

ash wrote: post #48
rodgerd wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

upstart was always a mediocre to terrible sysv replacement. The fact it couldn't handle such insignificant programs like postfix natively speaks volumes.

When I wrote "replacement", I didn't mean that all sysv scripts must be replaced. Postfix sysv script works fine with upstart, doesn't it?

Sure, if you consider it "fine" that upstart is too broken to reliably run a reasonably standard and fairly important daemon in native mode.

Re: Debian committee members vote for systemd as init system

#135

Post by rodgerd »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #14
forgottenpass wrote: post #9

What happened to the last vote? I saw some criticism that Ian jumped the gun by calling for votes when he did and putting two issues on at once but haven't read the archive in the meantime. Pretty unfortunate it took this long. Even as a casual observer it's looked like they'd eventually pick systemd a month ago. Hopefully this vote is the last one.

> What happened to the last vote? Steve Langasek objected to the wording of the "tight coupling" and "loose coupling" options, and several others on the committee decided to vote Further Discussion first in response to that. It turns out that Steve (upstart maintainer) and Russ (primary systemd advocate on the committee) both agree fairly closely on that issue, in that the committee really shouldn't be ruling on that…

It seems like that's the fundamental split between Ian and Everyone Else. Russ, Bdale, Steve, and Colin all want to make sure that people don't start creating unreasonable dependency chains ("I want the functionality provided by logind for my DE, therefore I will require systemd as the init system") when alternatives are available ("I need the functionality provided by logind so I require that and let systemd or the Canonical fork of logind provide it").

Ian is speccing it out so that nothing may ever rely on capabilities provided by a init implementation unless the Debian developers add that functionality to every possible init system in the archive. That is a very odd position, to put it mildly (you couldn't e.g. ship a GUI tool to manage upstart. You'd have to rewrite it to support systemd, as well).

Re: Debian committee members vote for systemd as init system

#136

Post by miga »

Since it is vote in a technical discussion, I wouldn't be so sure, until everybody voices their opinion. After all, insight into merits and flaws of each system may change.

And that's what technical (sub)committees are for.

PS I would vote for "further discussion" in a very Debian style.

Re: Debian committee members vote for systemd as init system

#137

Post by schwarze_pest »

mateuszf wrote: post #86
herokusaki wrote: post #45

Did Debian at any point consider launchd?

Doesn't work on Linux.

Launchd works on Linux (and xBSD) -- in the sense, that it can be ported without much effort. Systemd in contrast only works on Linux because it relies heavily on kernel features like cgroups.

Re: Debian committee members vote for systemd as init system

#139

Post by CameronNemo »

gingerlime wrote: post #91
CameronNemo wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am just going to go over Upstart and systemd systemd: dependency based init system. A service is written by declaring which services need to be started for that service to start. It is also a syslog like program (journal) and a cgroups writer (cgroups are a cointainment feature of the linux kernel). It also features socket activated and bus activated services, where the init system watches for a socket or dbus bus…

> Because Upstart does not use cgroups, it can not kill all of a services children (just that service), and so zombie services might be problematic. from my (very limited) experience with upstart, even the upstart scripts themselves can get into a unrecoverable zombie state[1], where the only workaround is to do one of the following 1) reboot ; 2) run some crazy-ass script[2] that forks processes until the right pid…

You should use init-checkconf before enabling the scripts.

Re: Debian committee members vote for systemd as init system

#140

Post by CameronNemo »

b6fan wrote: post #131
CameronNemo wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am just going to go over Upstart and systemd systemd: dependency based init system. A service is written by declaring which services need to be started for that service to start. It is also a syslog like program (journal) and a cgroups writer (cgroups are a cointainment feature of the linux kernel). It also features socket activated and bus activated services, where the init system watches for a socket or dbus bus…

I have used ptrace and cgroup (in an online judge system). The cgroup way feels more correct and stable while ptrace feels a hack. The usage of ptrace and SIGSTOP in upstart looks pretty ugly to me.

SIGSTOP is actually pretty clean, but it takes away some debugging methods from the sysadmin. Please note that systemd uses PID files to track services, which is an incredibly horrible method (although not as bad as ptrace).
Post reply on HN